27 April 2011

Hobo with a Shotgun

Adapted from the winner of Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse trailers contest, Hobo with a Shotgun is the second feature, after Machete, based on the phony previews that split Rodriguez's and Tarantino's films in theaters. This one's a pathological valentine to movies, and a disgusted rebuke of non-cinematic showmanship and spectacle. Dressed like a retired mailman, Rutger Hauer stars as the title character, who alights a freight train one sunny, overexposed morning and enters Hopetown, renamed Scumtown on its welcome sign by a wit with a Sharpie. There, street fights, thieving, kidnapping, pedophilia, pimping and prostitution run rampant in broad daylight. What's to blame: failed social policy? Crumbling infrastructure and a lack of investment? Nope: a gangster straight out of Dick Tracy—"The Drake" (Brian Downey)—and his douchebully, Delorean-driving, Bret Easton Ellis-looking sons. "When life gives you razor blades," The Drake says in one scene, "you make a baseball bat covered in razor blades"—a weapon he then uses to eviscerate a man hitherto hung upside-down and treated like a piñata by a few topless ladies.